Making a server max speed ship is expensive. It takes up like 30% of your power consumption while thrusting which is a huge chunk. It’s expensive in the fact that mobility chambers are not cheap to produce, and having turn rate and max speed chambers along with 2.5 TMR take up a lot of your ships power and room to put other systems. The game needs to be balanced so that 2.5 TMR is considered the normal amount of thrust so that missiles can actually hit their target and cannons are more accurate with a faster projectile.
As I already noted, the main cost of speed now is for going above server max (i.e. chambers).
If you are spending 30% of your total regen on raw thrust, then you are probably either building sub-standard reactors (probably not the case, if you are fighting competitively, but still sometimes a thing, particularly with the new reactor systems), or are over-armoring with massive regions of 10+ and 20+ layer armor because you are in a dueling bubble, outside of the context of actual gameplay (i.e. including legit mining for 100% of your resources). Because most of the most active, self-styled "PvP" leets I have played with have for many years
always been and presumably still are (protestations aside, because even when I was in their factions and saw them exploiting and was told how it worked, they claimed publicly and with great offense not to be doing that) cheaters who exploit for resources in MP either through bug exploits or admin exploitation, and therefore build
much differently than legit players and even legit PvPers in an open MP setting.
That's not a matter of a build perspective "based on PvP," it's a matter of build perspective based on a closed circuit of play with a handful of known opponents, and a
much different kind of overhead cost for build materials (in terms of time) than real players face, which of course leads to much, much different ship styles which are absurdly impractical for real MP gameplay but justified to others in their unrealistic excess by being purportedly "PvP" ships.
So it's fine sport and all to try and draw the dialogue into a classic fallacy of argument from special expertise, but even if arguments from expertise "I have a master's degree, so I know what's best" weren't irrational and fallacious (which they absolutely are), the context would still be very important. We must include a consideration of both the
Material (resources) and
Efficient (time/effort) Causes involved, not only the
Form which the ship takes or the
End for which it was designed.
Because the game is being developed not solely for serial deathmatches (although I believe it is definitely meant to accommodate that style). So basing default balance settings on a personal challenge of "Do you even PvP, bra??" is disregarding the entire existence of the universe, mining, trade, exploration and every other consideration. As opposed to a comprehensive approach that considers PvP as happening within the context of those other things as preconditions. That said, to answer your question, I did PvP on Starmade - on and off - for several years, including some melees as well as pirating and faction warfare in open MP. Lately though, I have returned to Starcraft 2 & DoTA 2 for my straight-up twitch PvP fix. In part because of the long period of inviability of real combat in Starmade recently, but honestly I had dropped it even before last Spring because I started to find it... unstimulating, repetitive, and mostly limited to a rather unsavory subculture that isn't entirely reflective of truly dedicated PvP games in a global sense (though those players are everywhere, to be sure), where victory isn't always a matter of who knows the most exploits. So "once avidly," but "not recently?" Because there really is no legit PvP at the moment. Not until systems are balanced, shipyards are fully working, people actually have bases that can be defeated, and most importantly the resource exploits and mass of other exploits are completely and solidly closed. Any "PvP" before that point is... maybe fun, but not a good basis for discussion about gameplay 'balance.'
To leave behind the issue of whether PvP competition is even a real thing in this unbalanced, easily cheated, alpha-state "sandbox space shooter" as of yet or if it's just a matter of competitive exploitation out of sync with intended gameplay, and return to the actual subject of my comment that apparently so upset you that you felt the need to confront me on the issue - propulsion, speed, and acceleration - I believe that it probably
should cost - easily - upward of 50% of a huge reactor's power to propel a truly huge pile of advanced armor and weapons meant solely for combat (or even a lightly armored heavy industrial facility / miner) at rates of acceleration like those server max involves.
Certainly if we wanted an armored and armed naval vessel to accelerate and cruise at rates and speeds similar to those of a light patrol craft or speedboat, the ship would have to be almost entirely composed of power plant and propulsion. Which is why they tend to be lumbering and extremely slow to reach cruising speeds instead. This does not reflect the state of thrust in Starmade at all. And that is not meant to be interpreted as me saying that Starmade thrust should somehow reflect RL naval thrust, only that greater consideration of physics would help balance out contextual, legitimate PvP combat. There are plenty of PvP games out there (Star Battle, World or Warships) that involve slow acceleration, clumsy turns, and slow overall move rates requiring forethought to go into every click and they each have thousands or tens of thousands of avid players. So I definitely don't believe that additional thrust costs would kill PvP in any way, not based on the actual evidence contrary, anyway. Rather I believe that making it borderline impossible for large capital ships to move the way light, small craft do will actually greatly improve gameplay in terms of both balance, player choice (i.e. go with huge, lumbering cruisers and dreadnaughts or with fighters, corvettes, escorts and fast frigates because you don't enjoy the slow, more tactically thoughtful action of capital warfare), and gameplay variety.
Current thrust removes variety and choice - you are forced to either go server max or be outclassed by those who do because they so easily can. The tradeoff between speed and firepower is insufficient to have a lumbering ship with well-designed armaments outperform a fast ship because the fast one can still afford to power very comparable DPS.
And, without devaluing those points above, I think it's worth mentioning that in Starmade - of all games accommodating PvP play - I think that empowering low-speed combatants is
extremely relevant. Because of sector transitions mostly, and also chunk loading and other performance issues that directly and substantially affect combat. All of those issues are compounded by speed of travel. Which means that allowing hyper-inflated speed & acceleration is a very poor decision for ensuring a satisfying "user experience." The higher the speeds, the poorer the gameplay. I don't want a speed limit nerf, because fast craft need that speed to evade things - the balance for their lack of heavy armor - I just believe that increasing the power curve of thrust acceleration would be beneficial in that it would increase the cost of speed and force substantially more trade-off in heavy ships - combat
and industrial.
